


You Can Leave Your Hat On

by trinityofone



Category: Buzzfeed Unsolved (Web Series), Watcher Entertainment RPF
Genre: Coming In Pants, Drunk Sex, Frottage, M/M, Wall Sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-07
Updated: 2020-08-07
Packaged: 2021-03-06 03:27:23
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,728
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25766689
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/trinityofone/pseuds/trinityofone
Summary: They’re in the desert, which everyone knows is an uncanny, liminal space where weird shit happens. Things like Ryan, who's suddenly shirtless for some reason, cornering Shane outside the bar.
Relationships: Ryan Bergara/Shane Madej
Comments: 23
Kudos: 228





	You Can Leave Your Hat On

**Author's Note:**

> So Watcher posted [this](https://www.instagram.com/p/CDjdYyQFLPc/) incredibly feral shirtless pic on Instagram; this is the incredibly feral shirtless fic that resulted.
> 
> It doesn't specifically take place during the filming of the Solvang episode, so much as it's inspired by the overall energy of that photograph.
> 
> Many thanks to Siria for encouraging this nonsense.

Ryan won’t take off his cowboy hat. He’s speaking more than half his sentences in a dumb drawl, until he forgets or giggles or swigs another mouthful of beer. Shane watches his throat move. He feels hot and itchy, his jeans too tight. It’s summer and they’re in the middle of the desert. That’s probably all it is.

Time passes in skips and jumps—the crew is raucous, celebrating. The pitchers circle. Shane decides it would be a good idea to go to the bathroom, more for the fresh air than anything else. TJ’s already gone and come back, so he knows there’s a whole process: key attached to a plastic fob, picked up at the bar; out the front door; around the back—a second squat little outbuilding, flanked by cacti. 

Inside, Shane stands dizzily in the too-bright florescent light, hand braced against the grimy tile. He pees, washes his hands, splashes water on his face. He looks into his own eyes and sees galaxies of thought there. It’s a little intense! Not something he wants to deal with right now, or maybe ever! So back out into the desert night, deep breath of air. Peaceful. 

Standing staring up at the stars, he should hear someone approach, the sound of boots crunching over sand and gravel. But instead he’s pulled back to earth by a voice: “Hey.”

Shane blinks. A glowing Ryan-apparition is standing in front of him, washed in moonlight. He isn’t wearing a shirt.

“I spilled beer _all over myself_ ,” Ryan says, in his usual voice. He’s still wearing the hat. This means he took his beer-drenched shirt off and then put the hat back on. He’s an idiot and Shane loves him very much. 

Shane already knew this; he just doesn’t think directly at it all that often.

He feels how drunk he himself is as he holds a hand up for a high five, and to clarify, says, “High five.”

Ryan grins and slaps his palm at Shane’s. Neither of them are graceful swans at the best of times, and right now, as mentioned: drunk, so Ryan misses and stumbles, collapsing with absurd drama against Shane’s chest. Shane’s right hand falls, his left hand rises, and he finds himself gripping Ryan by his bare biceps. His skin is warm, lightly sweaty. He tips his head back and beneath the rim of the cowboy hat, he’s shooting Shane a dopey grin. “Oops.”

“You’re a mess,” Shane says, affectionately.

“Your face is a mess,” Ryan retorts.

Shane laughs and says, “Good one,” but the last word disappears into a choked sound. Ryan has reached up and put his hands on Shane’s cheeks, like he’s trying ineptly to teach Shane how to vogue. 

“Look at you,” Ryan insists, an odd weight to his tone. Shane wonders if he’s seeing the galaxies.

“Why?” Ryan asks, which Shane feels _is_ a fair question, when it comes to his face. “Why do you make me…”

He trails off, leaving Shane unsure what he makes Ryan—except drink some water soon, probably. Ryan’s hands fall away as he lets out a sigh and steps back. Now there’s the crinch crunch of boot sounds as Ryan, looking like a piece of film being rewound, stumbles back. His shoulder blades hit the bar’s exterior wall and he lets out a sigh.

“Careful.” Shane’s picturing all that glowing skin getting scraped up, and he doesn’t like it. He wants to help but in all honesty his own head’s still kind of spinny and he doesn’t know how. “Ryan, buddy…you okay?”

Laboriously, Ryan lifts a hand. “C’mere,” he says, finger crooking. 

Shane starts forward slowly, like he’s approaching a wounded animal. There _is_ something animal in Ryan’s eyes: they look dark and hooded, though some of that may be shadow from the hat. He’s leaning at an odd angle, hips canted, thumbs hooked through the beltloops of his jeans.

“Are we doing a bit?” Shane asks. Normally he doesn’t have to ask—one of them begins and the other follows—but it’s been a long, strange night, and they’re in the desert, which everyone knows is an uncanny, liminal space where weird shit happens. It’s possible he forgot.

“No,” Ryan says, lip drooping down into a pout. “No, I’m dead—” He pauses to hiccup. “Dead serious, Shane. I want you to come _here_.”

“Here?” says Shane, stopping in front of him.

“ _No_.” He gestures closer.

Shane creeps forward, penetrating the bubble he usually tries to leave for people, to avoid what, at his height, can easily become a loom. “Here?”

“Why are you being annoying?” Ryan whines. His hands snake out and grab Shane by the hips. “Come _here_.”

Shane has a brief awareness of Ryan’s thigh between his thighs. Supernovas go off in his brain; white dwarfs, exploding.

“Um,” he says carefully, mentally conjugating German irregular verbs. “I can’t be in this space. _You’re_ in this space.” 

“Yes,” says Ryan, making a quick—and for him, not uncommon—turn from whiny to feral. “That’s the whole _point_.”

Then he moves his hips. He moves his hips in a way that _has_ to be deliberate, but that’s also got to be a mistake. It must be a mistake because if it’s not a mistake then he’s rutting against Shane’s leg _on purpose_. Which is not something that they’ve ever done before. It’s not part of their routine. Like, on the call sheet, it doesn’t say, “11:45pm: wrap. 12 am: drinks with crew. 1:30 am: Ryan brings himself off on Shane’s thigh.”

“Ryan,” Shane says, in the strained tones of someone who’s trying very hard not to feel the hard outline of his friend’s cock sliding dangerously close to his own aroused penis. But Ryan overrides him with a pained, “Shane, _please_.”

The groan Shane lets out as he lines them up a little better is not his fault. He even tries for another second to be an adult, saying, for the record: “You’re drunk. You don’t know what you’re doing.” 

To which Ryan, not unexpectedly, replies, “Your face doesn’t know what it’s doing,” before he kisses him.

That part…that part Shane really was not expecting.

Ryan’s more eager than skillful, octopus hands all over the place, sloppy. Shane’s not doing much better. He wants to lavish attention on Ryan’s mouth, but he also wants to touch him everywhere: his shoulders, his arms, his chest, his stomach, his butt. He manages to worm a hand down past Ryan’s waistband and under the elastic of his boxes, where he finds a bountiful handful of flesh and squeezes it. Ryan moans and thrusts forward even more urgently. He feels amazing, even through two layers of denim. There’s a buzz in the air, the whine of the electric lines maybe, and Shane feels it building under his skin. The bar’s sign washes Ryan’s torso in stripes of pink and purple and gold.

“Fuck, I’m gonna come,” says Ryan. His hat’s fallen off, is crunched between the back of his head and the wall. Shane wants to bury his nose in his tousled and sweaty hair. He has lost the bathroom key and someone from the bar’s staff will probably want to have a word with him.

“You can come,” Shane says, generously. “You can take your dick out and come all over me.”

Ryan makes a choked sound. “ _Fuuuck_ ,” he says again, with emphasis, then bites down hard on his lip. His body shakes in Shane’s arms, before he gasps, “Too late.”

He slumps back against the wall, breathing hard. A moment later, he’s fishing blindly for his hat. A couple of well-placed thumps with his fist and it’s vaguely hat-shaped again. “Look at this,” he says, returning it to his head. Shane thinks he’s being a little intense about his hat, but then he reaches for Shane’s hand and brings it to the dark patch on the front of his jeans. “Just look what you made me do.”

Shane jerks his hand back. His whole body’s gone cold, and he doesn’t feel drunk at all anymore; guilt has a wonderful sobering effect. “I—” he starts, wondering how he can apologize, what he can possibly say. 

But once again Ryan races over him: “No no no no—I was kidding! Well, no, actually, I was trying to be sexy. You know, like, ‘loooook what you made me _doooo_.’” From beneath the battered cowboy hat, Shane can make out what he supposes is meant to be an exaggeratedly sexy wink.

“Hot,” says Shane, warily.

“Fuck,” says Ryan, and Shane can remember, just moments ago, the way he moaned it. Shane thinks that, no matter what, he will always remember that moan. In his own too-tight jeans, he still throbs. 

“I thought it was in character—not that I’m playing a character!” Ryan sounds breathless as he rushes to explain. “Only the character of someone brave enough to do this. Because I spilled my beer all over myself and it was hilarious and I looked for you and you were _gone_ and then it wasn’t so funny anymore, because you weren’t there. It’s only good if you’re there, Shane.”

Shane is still hovering, a wary few feet back. “So you decided the best thing to do was follow me to the bathroom, then without any preamble make out with me until you came in your pants?” 

“Correct.”

Shane blinks a few times, processing this. Then he leans forward and bats Ryan’s hat off his head.

“I mean, it wasn’t the hat’s fault, but okay,” Ryan says.

“ _Universes_ ,” Shane breathes, and no he will not explain it, thank you, but he will break away from the endless depths of Ryan’s eyes to kiss him again. He will rock his hips against Ryan’s side, and when Ryan starts unbuckling his belt, Shane will let him; and when Ryan whispers, “You can—you can go ahead and do that thing you said, if you want,” Shane will do so with desperate urgency, followed by a deep, satisfied sigh.

As soon as he can breathe again, he goes back to kissing Ryan. The desperation is gone now: this is slow and soft and sleepy, would make even look sweet and innocent, were Ryan not shirtless with Shane’s come all over his belly.

“Gosh I hope no one else has to pee,” Ryan says eventually. They’re not even really kissing anymore, so much as resting against each other, giving one another the occasional caress or affectionate pat.

“Yeah, I lost the key,” Shane admits.

“No, I mean ‘cause they’d see us. And like, your dick is hanging out, dude.”

“Oh,” says Shane. He fumbles to put it away.

“And it’s enormous. _Fuck_! There’s no chance of anyone missing that.”

Shane feels his cheeks heat. “We should clean you up,” he says. 

“Okay, give me your shirt.”

“Why?” It comes out a squawk.

“Because _someone_ lost the bathroom key. And I left mine inside.”

Shane probes the ground around him with the toe of his boot for about thirty second before giving up. “ _Literally_ the shirt off my back,” he says, unbuttoning. 

Ryan takes the shirt and wipes off his stomach, then ties it around his waist so that the arms kind of sort of cover his crotch, like he’s a middle school girl trying to hide a period stain. Shane snorts. “We should be ashamed to even be _thinking_ of going back inside. You look like a member of the world’s worst grunge band.”

Ryan looks mildly offended for half a second before his face lights up. “Pearl Necklace Jam,” he says, with evident pride.

“Wow.” Shane is both disgusted and impressed, and the combination, perhaps worryingly, makes his heart flip. “That’s terrible _and_ inaccurate. I didn’t—” He gestures to Ryan’s nipple-to-neck region. 

Ryan retrieves his hat from the ground, dusting it off again his knee. “Next time,” he says, punctuating the promise by putting the hat on.

Is he trying to give Shane a Pavlovian reaction? To a _cowboy hat_? 

Before Shane can inquire, Ryan starts toward the bar door, not looking at _all_ like he just had messy semi-public drunk wall sex with his friend and business partner. 

Shane counts to sixty before slinking in after him, because he’s definitely seen that in a movie involving clandestine sexual encounters. Ryan has shamelessly rejoined their table, but Shane—avoiding the bartender’s gaze lest he blurt out his bathroom key sins—lopes instead to the jukebox. The gods of the desert are still smiling down on him: the song he wants is there; he has enough quarters in his pocket. The horns start to play as he struts back over to the table, and when Katie turns and lofts an eyebrow in his direction, says, “Shane, why—” he simply shouts back, “Solidarity, baby!”

But his eyes are on Ryan when Joe Cocker starts to sing, and so he sees the moment when Ryan realizes, when he gets it; Shane sees them light up, twin pulsars, and it’s only that a staff member has come over and is politely asking them to adjust their wardrobe or leave the premises that prevents him from kissing Ryan again in front of everyone.

Katie hands over the rental car key only after making them solemnly promise that they will use it _only_ to retrieve spare clothing, _no driving_ , “I swear to god, you’re not even allowed to _look_ at the front seat,” and then they’re tumbling back out into the night, laughing and stupid. Ryan hops up onto the trunk of the car and tugs Shane after him, kissing him as the car bobs on its wheels. “You know,” Shane says on a breath, “you know my thing about heroin?”

“Yeah?” says Ryan, though he looks confused. Or maybe just horny.

“This—this is what I’m afraid of.”

“Oh, shit,” Ryan says, sincerely. He kisses Shane again.

“Yeah,” Shane agrees, and they kiss some more. “But like. Too late now though.”

“Do you have the car key?” Ryan asks after a minute.

“I thought you had it.”

“Oops.”

With the help of their cell phone flashlights, and a bit of crawling/messing around in the dirt, they finally find the key.

“It would be crazy if this were actually the bathroom key.”

“It _would_.” Shane had, in fact, been thinking the exact same thing.

“Hmm. Let’s just stay down here a minute.”

They lie on the ground, looking up at the stars. Desert dust sticks to Shane’s sweaty back; he could paint a line of it down Ryan’s cheek.

“Do you think any of this is real?” he asks.

“Fuck, have you gone full existential on me? First you don’t believe in ghosts, now you’re not sure about _existence_?”

Shane scoffs to hear his views so ill-represented. “I believe in tangible things. Existence is tangible. I’m tangible. _You’re_ tangible.” He strokes a finger down Ryan’s flank, proving it.

Ryan shivers and rolls closer to him.

“Then what are you asking?”

Shane swallows. “Deserts are liminal spaces. Like airports. Love an airport. Nothing’s fully real in an airport.”

Ryan gawps at him for a moment. “Are you ‘What happens in Vegas’-ing this? Because we’re in the fucking desert?”

“Actually, maybe it’s no coincidence that Vegas _is_ in the desert, I never made the connection before but—ow!”

Ryan has swatted him; then, seemingly unsatisfied with a simple swatting, rolls over to straddle Shane’s hips. “You think everything I believe is stupid, but you also think I only want to kiss you because we’re in the _desert_?”

Well not when you put it like _that_.

But also, yes.

“Maybe,” Shane says.

Ryan shakes his head. “You are such an idiot,” he says. Then he leans over, stubble scraping along Shane’s collarbone and throat as he moves his mouth next to Shane’s ear.

“Pretend we’re on a beach…in a jungle…on a…on a fucking _fjord_ , Shane…”

He starts kissing Shane’s neck, then; kisses his pulse point and his jawline; kisses Shane’s mouth until Shane can almost believe he hears the lapping of the waves, the birdsong… They lie there under the big dark sky and they kiss and touch and make even more a mess of themselves, and in the end Shane would swear he tastes the cool glacial air on Ryan’s lips, tangible as anything.

**Author's Note:**

> Working title was literally "Feral shirtless cowboys."


End file.
